A Liberal War on Science?

Don’t bury Mark Regnerus’ study of gay parents. Learn what it can teach the left and right.

Mark Regnerus is a hateful bigot. He’s an ultra-conservative with links to Opus Dei. His new research paper on same-sex parenting is “intentionally misleading” and“seeks to disparage lesbian and gay parents.” His “so-called study doesn’t match 30 years of scientific research that shows overwhelmingly that children raised by parents who are LGBT do equally as well.” His “junk science” and “pseudo-scientific misinformation,” pitted against statements from the American Psychological Association and “every major child welfare organization,” deserve no coverage or credence.

Will Saletan writes about politics, science, technology, and other stuff for Slate. He’s the author of Bearing Right.

That’s what four of the nation’s leading gay-rights groups—the Human Rights Campaign, the Family Equality Council, Freedom to Marry, and the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation —declared in a joint statement this week. Flanked by a mob of bloggers, they’re out to attack Regnerus’ motives, destroy his credibility, and banish his study from the scientific record. Even Slate contributor E.J. Graff says “Slate's editors should be ashamed” for publishing Regnerus’ “dangerous propaganda.”

Wow. Regnerus’ paper certainly has flaws. But before we all go get our stones, pitchforks, and kerosene, may I suggest an alternative? Trust science. Don’t bury this study. Embrace it. The evidence Regnerus collected can help all of us rethink our ideas about sexuality and marriage. It can enlighten the right as well as the left. In fact, it’s already doing that.

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Yes, Regnerus is socially conservative. But he’s reflective, open-minded, and reality-based. The two exhibits cited in the indictment of him are a Slatepiece against promiscuity and a Christianity Today piece promoting early marriage. But if you read the articles, you’ll find that his case for early marriage focuses on the implausibility of prolonged abstinence. His case against promiscuity is grounded in a critique of the power imbalance between men and women. He’s a more complicated guy than his critics let on.

Yes, the analysis was flawed. But the errors can be deconstructed, and the data can be re-examined. Regnerus used a broad behavioral question—“Did either of your parents ever have a romantic relationship with someone of the same sex?”—to define which parents were gay. Then he used a calendar—“Please select the ages when you lived with the following persons”—to clarify how long each respondent had lived with the gay parent and that parent’s same-sex partner. The calendar, unlike the behavioral question, measured family structure. Regnerus says he thought “we’d comfortably get enough cases wherein the respondent reported living with mom and her partner for many consecutive years. But few did.”

If the structural question had yielded more kids raised by gay couples, Regnerus could have compared their outcomes to the outcomes of kids raised by straight couples. But it didn’t. And here’s where he made his first mistake: He substituted the behavioral question for the structural question. He compared children of intact mom-and-dad families not to the tiny subset of kids raised by same-sex couples (which was statistically nonviable) but to the much bigger sample of kids with a parent who had at some point engaged in a gay relationship.

Don’t take it from me. Take it from David Blankenhorn, the most widely respected scholarly critic of same-sex marriage:

Particularly confusing is the attempt to compare outcomes of children whose parents had a same-sex relationship (which is not an issue of family structure) with outcomes of children who grew up in bio[logical] two-parent married homes (which is an issue of family structure). Tangentially, if this study can’t tell us much of anything about family structure, it CERTAINLY can tell us nothing at all about the issue of marriage, gay or otherwise.

What happens if we fix Regnerus’ mistake? What happens if we scrap the structure-behavior comparison and compare structure to structure? What do the calendar data tell us?

One notable theme among the adult children of same-sex parents, however, is household instability, and plenty of it. … While we know that good things tend to happen—both in the short-term and over the long run—when people provide households that last, parents in the [study] who had same-sex relationships were the least likely to exhibit such stability.

[O]nly two respondents total said they lived with their mother and her [lesbian] partner nonstop from birth to age 18. Two more said they did so for 15 years, and two more for 13 years. To be sure, these 10 fared better on more outcomes than did their less-stable peers. They’re just uncommon, and too small a group to detect statistically-significant differences, for sure.

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The numbers don’t add up, and the subset is too small to generalize, but you get the picture: Kids of gay parents, like kids of straight parents, did better in stabler families. And this fits the pattern of all those studies the gay-rights groups are citing against Regnerus: Children raised by committed, financially secure gay couples turn out fine.

This is where Regnerus made his second mistake: He pitted his study against prior studies that found happier outcomes in gay families. He attributes his findings to “better methods.” But there’s no contradiction between his study and the others. The prior studies simply targeted and featured the stablest, most educated gay couples. They were too narrow. Regnerus, by using the “did your parent ever have a gay relationship” question, captured all the messed-up families that had been left out. But his net was too broad: It yielded a sample dominated by kids who had scarcely lived in a same-sex household.

Arguing over whether to believe Regnerus’ data or the other studies is like arguing over whether to examine your neighbor through a microscope or a space-based telescope. Each view captures what the other can’t see. But ultimately, you’re looking at the same thing. The telescopic view shows gay parents in unstable households failing. The microscopic view shows gay parents in stable households succeeding. Stability, not orientation, is the story.

Shifting the conversation from orientation to stability doesn’t end the debate. But it does break the logjam. It frees us from dissent-silencing appeals to authority, such as the Bible or policy statements from the American Psychological Association. It opens social conservatives to the possibility of accepting gay marriage, since, as Regnerus points out, “whether some relationship arrangements are more systematically prone to disorganization than others” is an “empirically testable question.” By the same token, it challenges homosexuals to deliver. The Regnerus study shows how wretchedly unstable the households of most gay parents were in the years when gay sex and gay marriage were illegal. We have a chance now to do better. Don’t let the experiment fail.

That’s why we should take this study seriously. It tells both sides, including its author and its funders, difficult truths they need to hear. Family stability matters. And when same-sex couples are permitted, encouraged, and determined to provide that stability, kids do better. The left’s enlightenment about sexual orientation can be married to the right’s wisdom about family values. It won’t be easy. But it’s worth the effort.